Book Review: Education of a Princess: A Memoir by Marie, Grand Duchess of Russia

Book Review by Bud Gundy

I first read this book 20 years ago, when a dear friend recommended it with the promise of a story I’d never forget.  She was right.  She was right about so many things, but that’s another story.

I recently re-read this book and it was just as engrossing as I remember.

The Grand Duchess in question was Maria Pavlovna (known by intimates her entire life as Marie).  She was the Tsar’s cousin, and in the bloated monarchies of pre World War I Europe, that was close enough to earn her the style of “Imperial Highness” and bring her into the world on a cushion of privilege and comfort.

When she was not yet two years old, her younger brother Dmitri was born, and her mother died as a result of childbirth.  Thus was forged one of those sibling bonds that raises eyebrows and carries a suggestion of unsavory possibilities, but is in reality almost certainly nothing more than the excessive and desperate love of a sister so set apart from the real world that she clung her entire life to the one person who fully understood her own isolation, however gilded.

 After her father was banished from Russia for re-marrying without the Tsar’s permission, Marie and her brother were raised by an aunt and uncle, Serge and Ella, a regal couple that by her own description share that peculiar bent for obsessive concentration on their own neurosis, an apparently common affliction for those who grow up surrounded by scraping obedience.  She describes her uncle as almost fanatical in his love for the children, jealous even of their playmates, while her beautiful, ethereal aunt devoted herself to jewels and fashion.

A bomb would change everything.

In her early years, Marie was shielded from the knowledge of the revolutionary forces afoot in Russia, although the dark reality is so pervasive it makes itself known in small but sinister ways, even to a girl who spends her life behind palace walls. 

While living in a palace on the grounds of the Kremlin itself, she and her brother heard the bomb that assassinated her uncle as he left for a meeting.  The explosion was powerful enough to send her life reeling off into unimaginable directions.

This change of course wasn’t evident at first, and like other royal princesses of the day she found herself engaged at 16 to a Swedish prince, William – a man she had met earlier that day.  The wedding photo in the book shows the young couple on their wedding day, awkwardly standing apart, bedecked in robes, jewels and ribbons.  The stiff formality might be expected, but the apprehension and tight smiles are impossible to miss.  It is a photo almost comical in its ironic contrasts of wary faces and regal splendor, and the royal trappings fail utterly to hide the unhappy reality, giving the impression of a couple in Halloween costumes.

Her description of life as a Swedish princess is a ripping yarn, full of the playful antics corrupted by unblinking public attention.  But there her stories are oddly empty of emotion, and even the birth of her son, a cause of national celebration, is treated in an offhand manner.  Indeed, she devotes more time to her art classes than to her relationship to her son, and it is no surprise that the marriage falls apart and she goes to the strenuous effort to secure a divorce that was much frowned-upon.  She is circumspect about the reasons for her deep unhappiness, but my own online research reveals that she told various friends that her husband was having affairs with men.

She returns to Russia just before the start of World War I, and joins the Red Cross to train as a nurse.  It’s fascinating to read about her adventures in hastily prepared hospitals in the early months of the war and she claims to have pitched in with everybody else, engaging in the most menial work.  Of course, her identity is often discovered and she claims to be shocked and horrified when various actors who had treated her normally at first find out she is a princess and thereafter strain with the etiquette that she reliably disdains.

But her royal connections always intrude, most especially when the war turns disastrous for Russia.  Here her story takes an epic turn, when Rasputin (the mystic who was hated the length and breadth of Russia except in the rarified confines of the Emperor’s house) is murdered and her brother Dmitri is implicated in the plot.  While the Russian public cheers his death, the Imperial reaction of punishing the killers by exile and banishment destroys the rationale.  In the end, Rasputin’s murder hastened the revolution by cementing the impression that the Tsar and Tsaritsa were alien beings, the only people in the land to mourn the man known as the mad monk.

When revolution comes, the change in her standing with the public is instantly clear to Marie, and her authority soon collapses.  While her immediate co-workers have spent nearly three years observing her work ethic and her fearless efforts in miserable conditions, everyday soldiers and civilians have no such experience to fall back on.  The terror for her family mounts as the Bolsheviks take power and every last comfort is taken away.

She marries again and gives birth to another son, but events soon force her to flee Russia in fear of her life.  The story is gripping and filled with tension, but her memoirs end abruptly soon after her escape.

I’m thankful for the internet, where I was finally able to answer many nagging questions about her life that she avoided in the book, such as her first husband’s homosexuality.  She was known for the rest of her life as an aloof woman and her Swedish son claimed that he barely knew her and that their few meetings as adults were awkward and strained.  She moved from place to place, including New York City where she wrote this memorable and fascinating memoir, but one suspects that she was always a person who lived in excruciating isolation, a lifelong result of coming of age cosseted in a corrupted monarchy that was dying even as she was born.

Book Review: The Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg by Helen Rappaport

Book Review by Bud Gundy

The assassination of the Romanov family is one of those tales that ushers a person into adulthood, a shocking revelation that forever warps your sense of justice and hardens the edges of the world around you.  The visual is too terrible to not leave scars: the former Tsar surrounded by his wife, his frail son, his four daughters and a handful of remaining loyal servants lined up against the wall and gunned down.

The reality was far worse than I ever imagined.

Over the years, I’ve read several books about the fate of the Romanovs, my favorite being, The Education of a Princess by Marie, Grand Duchess of Russia. She was the Tsar’s cousin, and published her memoirs in 1930.  A photograph in the front pages shows a melancholy woman looking off with a vacant stare, a fitting visage for one of the few Romanovs to escape Russia with her life.  An engrossing story of a pampered girl who grew into a sharply insightful woman, she was frank about the lost intellectual opportunities that she squandered early in life, and her perspective on the fall of the Romanov throne was enriched with a familial take - especially the Tsaritsa Alexandra's disastrous obsession with the mystic Rasputin.  Her escape from Russia was a dramatic and heart-stopping account.

Helen Rappaport’s The Last Days of the Romanovs: Tragedy at Ekaterinburg filled in many details for me about the Imperial family’s final days, replaying their last 11 days with a careful and incisive eye for enlightening moments.  It also gives brief and comprehensible overviews of the political and military forces at work, no small feat given the mind-boggling number of actors in this story.  By clearing away much of the ancillary information, Rappaport makes the political intrigue easier to navigate.  Even those alive during that period must have found the sheer number of conflicting forces a whirlwind of confusion, and I admired the way she dealt with these issues forcefully, without resorting to the easy solution of giving us a highly romanticized and poignant family tale instead.

But poignancy abounds, most especially in her descriptions of the four Arch Duchesses.  I’ve seen newsreel footage of the Tsar’s daughters, and they looked for all the world like the refined and stiffly formal girls you would expect them to be, which is also how Tsarist propaganda portrayed them.  But Rappaport gives them life, and you discover how the girls, isolated first by their positions, then by the health demands of their mother and brother and finally by their imprisonment, turned to each other, and inward, for the strength to rise each day. 

The most memorable scene in the book comes the day before their brutal murders, when the Soviet functionary in charge of the household sent local peasant women to clean the family rooms, to give the royals a sense of normalcy and routine and deflect any suspicion of imminent doom.  Cheerfully, the daughters helped the women move furniture and pitched in with the cleaning, managing a few brief, whispered comments because conversation was forbidden – a rule enforced by lurking Soviet guards.

Rappaport also gives us the essential history of the Tsar and Tsaritsa, enough for us to get a sense of their personalities and the influences that shaped the way they looked at the world.  The young Alexy, heir to the misbegotten throne so ill-managed by his hapless father, also comes to life but sadly as a gravely ill and frustrated child who was also spoiled by the scraping attention his hemophilia demanded of his family and minders.  I was thankful that Rappaport did not dwell on Alexandra’s obsession with Rasputin, whose supposedly magical powers made her a fanatical devotee in a desperate hope for a miracle to cure her son.  While Rasputin is a fascinating character, he is such an obvious megalomaniac that I find his particular role in the story to be tiresome.  Why give so much attention to a man who would be happy to let the world burn if it brought him more notice?

As I described above, the family’s murder is a shocking event.  But nothing prepared me for the gruesome reality of the scene.  I thought I knew the story – the rifles aimed by an execution squad at the family who had a moment of fear as they realized what was about to happen.  A hail of bullets, a few screams and some smoke. 

I had no idea.

First, there were no rifles - just pistols.  The execution took 20 minutes.  Most of the squad was drunk.  All four daughters survived the first round of bullets.  It was a gruesome bloodbath and included a raging Bolshevik, a berserker of the first order, filled with such hatred for the monarchy he waded into the pile of corpses to finish off the survivors by slashing with his bayonet and even then failing to give them final peace.  Rappaport’s description of the execution is horrific and terrifying, a heart-breaking and disturbing tale.  You rage at the sloppiness and inhumanity, the pointless suffering and excruciating length.  Perhaps this was the moment that the Soviet Union became cursed forever, when the seminal event of its birth was handled with such monumental incompetence.  And even after everyone had been slain, the sloppiness goes on and on and on, with a tale of burial so shoddy and poorly managed that it is amazing to read.

I admire monarchy to a point, as long as it understands its proper role in the modern world – to project an image, to provide solace, to be a living embodiment of national aspirations and pride.  The idea of being born into a position of leadership is ridiculous and infantile, and I know the Tsarist regimes were not kindly and benevolent.  They were repressive, stained with autocratic impulses, anti-Semitism and other deep corruptions.  I don’t think I would have liked the Tsar and Tsaritsa very much if I had known them. 

But it is indisputable that the Bolsheviks were even more brutal and repressive from almost the moment they took power, and in time became perhaps the most corrupt society so far in the history of the word, and there’s some fine competition for that ignoble title.

Perhaps that’s why the legend of the Romanovs has reached a fever pitch since the fall of the Soviet Union and why they’ve been canonized as martyrs by the Russian Orthodox Church.  The town of their final imprisonment has become a shrine to their memory.  Both of their burial sites (yes, both – you have to read it to believe it) are places of pilgrimage today.  Their remains were moved to the beautiful church of Sts. Peter and Paul in St. Petersburg, to lie with their royal ancestors, in a ceremony beamed across the world.  All this adulation is a bit overdone for my taste (although I am sorry that I visited St. Petersburg before their bones were interred there – I would have liked to visit their graves) but it is completely understandable.  Who doesn’t want a chance to atone for a dreadful mistake?

Book Review: Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic’s First-Class Passengers and Their World by Hugh Brewster

Book Review by Bud Gundy

I was 11 years old when I saw Walter Lord’s classic book about the Titanic, A Night to Remember on the library stacks.  I’d seen glimpses of the black and white movie of the same name and I had enough experience as a reader to know that I would learn a lot more in a book than by watching a film.  I was curious about a tragedy that I knew very little about, but that was apparently so profound that was still a part of popular culture decades later.

I was enraptured by the book, swept up in a story filled to bursting with so much pathos and irony.  I’ve read many other books about the Titanic over the years and seen nearly every dramatic version of the story.  I’ve even come to cherish the lesser-known Titanic dramas, like the subplot in the television classic, “Upstairs, Downstairs,” when Lady Marjorie becomes one of the few First Class women to go down with the ship. I’ve also come to loathe the garish, sloppy retellings such as the wretched excesses in the 1979 movie that even Cloris Leachman as Molly Brown couldn’t salvage.

So it was with mixed feelings that I recently began, Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic’s First-Class Passengers and Their World by Hugh Brewster.  While everyone knows the classic Titanic stories – The band playing until nearly the end, Ida Strauss giving up her seat in a lifeboat to die with her husband Isador and the profound irony of the world’s most famous new ship sinking on her first ocean crossing – I wondered if I hadn’t heard these tales too many times to find anything new.   I’m happy to say I was wrong.

Brewster’s book illustrated the story with a very intimate, frank and 21st century perspective on the people who were onboard when the Titanic went down 100 years ago.

The most interesting example (for me) was Archibald Butt, a top presidential aide first to Teddy Roosevelt and then President Taft, who was sailing home from visiting his sister in England to gear up for the coming election.  He was a Washington power broker, a famous man-about-town covered regularly in the media and so highly regarded that after the sinking all of DC waited anxiously for news of his fate.

Butt – whose name would be the subject of much glee on The Daily Show and the Colbert Report today – was also a famous bachelor.  It’s impossible to read his story and not instantly spot a closeted gay man, and much to my relief Brewster does not indulge in the easy, discreet silence that an earlier generation of historians would have used.  Butt was clearly a gay man who was traveling with a friend whose surviving letters make clear that he had a long-standing love affair with a dashing European man.

There was also a trio of men known to High Society as “The Three Amigos,” wealthy bachelors who were well known for always traveling together and never, oddly *cough*cough* with female companions.

Brewster’s ease with the obvious truths about these men gave the Titanic story a refreshingly contemporary perspective.  It’s an unblinking style that gives new insight to many of the Titanic legends.  While the lifeboat order of “women and children first” has been used even recently to bemoan lost chivalry, a surviving woman testified just days after the sinking that in her opinion these actions were largely misunderstood.  At the time the lifeboats were being filled, she said, the men had no idea that the ship would actually sink, and she wondered how the story would have played out if everyone had understood what was about to happen.  As it was, it was only after most of the lifeboats had been launched that many of those remaining on deck realized that they would not be rescued.

The image of selfless men silently accepting their deaths to allow weak, hysterical women to survive was also irresistible to certain editorial writers of the day, who used the emotionally-laden heroism to rail against the suffragette movement.  Women who wanted to vote, they argued, didn’t understand the natural order of the universe and that men had only the protection of women uppermost in their minds.  Insights like this give us a glimpse into the durability of the reactionary mind, but knowing that they failed is also a source of inspiration.

Also on this topic – I knew the famous stories of how the wealthy male survivors - Lord Cosmo Duff Gordon and the White Star Line’s president J. Bruce Ismay chief among them – were forever stained as cowards.  But I knew nothing of the Japanese passenger who went down with the ship but was rescued by a lifeboat off a floating door.  Given the hatred and vitriol showered on him by his countrymen afterwards, you wonder if he wouldn’t have done better to perish in the open ocean.  Many of the male survivors suffered similar fates.

Brewster’s account of the sinking and the hours the survivors spent in the lifeboats was also comprehensive and wrenching, worth the read all by themselves.  He also illustrated the actions of Molly Brown in greater detail than I’ve read before, and I was moved by the way she raised funds for the surviving Third Class passengers even as the Carpathia steamed for New York, and remained on the rescue ship after it docked and the other First Class passengers had fled to fancy hotels.  She stayed behind, sleeping on a bench, until every surviving Third Class passenger’s information had been collected so that they could receive payments through the Titanic Survivors Relief Fund that she organized.

Brewster ends his book with brief accounts of how many of the survivors lived out the rest of their lives.  It’s a shock to read of those who died only months later in car accidents or from disease, and I was startled to see how many of those in the lifeboats were still alive when I was born in 1963. 

The Titanic has become an all-purpose morality tale for anyone of any philosophical outlook.  It’s also an easy way for storytellers to instantly add intense drama to their tales.  I recently saw James Cameron’s 3D version of “Titanic” at the theater, and while the special effects added nothing new to the movie, I was surprised at my reaction this time.  The first time around, I thought it was an unbearably saccharine love story enlivened by a brilliant visual record of the sinking.  Fourteen years later, the love story resonated with more force and the sinking was just as powerful.  Brewster’s book also provoked a powerful emotional reaction, enriched by a fresh perspective glossed with contemporary sensibilities.

The Titanic captured the imaginations of millions of people in 1912 as she steamed into the open ocean heading for New York.  A century later, her voyage still hasn’t ended.

Book Review: Awake Unto Me by Kathleen Knowles

Book Review by Bud Gundy

Awake Unto Me is one of those novels that can introduce you to a whole new genre of fiction.  In my case, I have never read a lesbian love story and was thrilled with the opportunity to explore a new world of emotion and passion.

Kerry and Beth come from very different worlds in turn of the century San Francisco – Kerry from the rough and tumble dives of the world-famous Barbary Coast, and Beth from the sedate calm of San Francisco’s Mission District.

But they are headed on an inexorable path towards one another, and finally meet through a mutual friend and mentor, the honor-bound Dr. Addison.  The result is a deeply felt and thoroughly satisfying story of love and desire.  Any gay person will instantly recognize the fumbling uncertainty and ache of longing that entangles the two characters as they struggle to vocalize their feelings for one another.  Unsure and wary, they feel a growing sense of destiny as a couple, but are too shocked and frightened to share their emotions with each other.

Meanwhile, other characters nudge them together in unintentional ways.  A prim housewife, a bawdy Barbary Coast prostitute, an abusive preacher and even strangers in hotel rooms and on the dark and unsafe environs along Market Street push Kerry and Beth closer together.  However, the forbidden nature of their desire and their own confusion prolong the romantic denouement.  As readers, we share their frustration at the unnecessary but wholly understandable delays that even war and a trip across the ocean can’t hasten.

Along the way, Knowles rewards the reader in other ways, with vivid and compelling descriptions of life in Victorian San Francisco, a place that (much like the modern city) contained different levels of existence, of rigid class distinctions, differing and fluid versions of morality and frustrating gender barriers to career aspirations.  Not to mention the sheer fun of exploring the city that was San Francisco a century ago, in places you can still visit, and others that exist only in modern ruins.

I found myself charmed by the story of a quiet girl working in her parent’s store who befriends another girl who lives in a sprawling, brawling home of different ethnicity in equal measure to yet another tale of a girl coming of age under the lackluster but loving care of a drunken and roughhouse father.  Nuance shades the emotions, sometimes igniting scorn and anger but never without a touch of tenderness and admiration.

This is an ambitious story, but one that succeeds in drawing the portrait of an intense love by women who seem unaware of their own bravery and poise.  Perhaps that’s the essence of courage – to not just defy the odds, but plow on regardless and heedless, not unaware of the obstacles but in the end indifferent to the consequences when their emotions become overwhelming.

If I had one complaint, it would be that the vivid descriptions of a woman breaking into the world of haute cuisine in one of San Francisco’s finest hotels left room for much more exploration.  It left me wanting more, and more is precisely what I hope to get from Knowles in future novels.

Book Review: A Dance With the Devil: A True Story of Marriage to a Psychopath by Barbara Bentley

Book Review by Bud Gundy

When a sociopath enters your life, nothing is ever the same again.  You learn what terms such as,“pathological liar” really mean and you stare right into the face of pure evil and realize that you’ve invited it to come waltzing into your world.

I recently read a book about a woman’s life with a psychopath (the words “sociopath” and “psychopath” are interchangeable to a great degree) and it revived many memories I'd thought I'd long put aside, so I decided to write this quick review, along with some of my own history.

I was 24 years-old when I met M.  I had just moved to San Francisco the month before and the gay community was in a state of constant turmoil and mourning from the enormous impact of AIDS.  It is difficult to describe the trauma of those years – the late 1980’s in San Francisco.  It was common to see men openly weeping on the street, death was everywhere and I once saw a man whose face was disfigured by disease in a way I didn't even know was possible, a sight so disquieting that it still haunts me 25 years later.

I was in a state of shock, I knew almost nobody, I was terrified of having sex and I was desperate for my first gay relationship.  In short, I was a very easy mark for M.

His behavior was maddening from the start but he fostered, and I felt, enormous pity for all the things he had suffered that he talked about non-stop.  His most baffling habit was to leave a store, bar or a restaurant no matter what was happening.  He once got up during the middle of meal and left, leaving me to scramble to pay the bill and follow him out.  He never gave an explanation for this bizarre behavior, and in time I stopped asking.

M was not the high-flying sociopath detailed in Barbara Bentley’s, A Dance with the Devil: A True Story of Marriage to a Psychopath.  The man she met and eventually married was grandiose and extravagant, a spinner of elaborate tales that showered him with such glory and praise that they were guests at a Presidential Inaugural Ball and were treated with great deference at military events.  Her account of their relationship, his deceit and dishonesty, is a riveting read, and I found myself nodding with furious agreement many times.

But one story in Bentley’s account made me sit up with shock and amazement.  Even though I’ve long since recognized that almost all of M’s stories were invented for the sole purpose of manipulating me for sympathy and pity, I had never questioned one in particular until I read Bentley’s book.

In Bentley’s case, after many years of marriage and fiscal turmoil, she confronted him about his stories and demanded that she accompany him to a class that he was supposedly teaching in the UC system.  At that point, she was doubtful that he was even employed, let alone a professor on campus, and as they left the house, he faked a sudden medical emergency that resulted in both of them tumbling down a staircase.

Her husband’s need for such a dramatic diversion suddenly clarified a story from my life with M.  We had completed an application to lease an apartment together, and I had received a call from the rental agent.  She told me that all was well with my financial history, but added, “As you know, M has some serious issues in his past.”  She told me that she would stick up for us and that we would get the apartment despite the problems uncovered by the background check.

I had no idea what she was talking about, and I was too embarrassed to ask her for details.

Later that day, I sat down with M and demanded he tell me anything that he was withholding about his past.  Suddenly, he began weeping and wailing, and started spinning a tale about his current roommate.  It was a dramatic story.  His roommate was crazy, and was threatening to kill or seriously injure him.  I instantly forgot about his concealment of past problems and focused all of my attention on his emergency.  M had successfully drawn my attention away from his lies, and even though he was the one being deceitful, I ended up feeling guilty for confronting him.

Bentley also details the way her husband shielded her from his family, even his children, creating elaborate stories about hurt feelings and concerns for the (non-existent) family fortune.  M also kept me far away from his family, and in the 3 years we were together I never once thought it was suspicious that his father, stepfather and mother all died.  During this same period his sister was seriously injured in a car accident.

It simply never occurred to me that someone would lie about the deaths and serious injury of close family members in order to manipulate another person.  Months after M supposedly attended his mother’s funeral, I was cleaning our apartment and found a card, carefully hidden inside a book, that she had mailed to him within the past few weeks.  At that point, our relationship was such a grotesque distortion of normal human interaction that I actually saved the knowledge that his mother was still alive so that I could use it as ammunition during our next inevitable argument.  I still have no idea where he went that weekend he supposedly flew back to Texas to say goodbye to his mother.

Bentley’s husband was a far more ambitious psychopath than M, but they shared a love of finery and they coveted expensive things.  I lived with M back when credit cards were not easy to get, and I received my first one during our time together.  As soon as I opened it, he eagerly asked if we could go shopping.  Stunned, I said absolutely not, that it was for emergencies.  He sulked for a moment or two, but soon went completely calm, and I could see the wheels turning in his mind.  Little did I know he’d been embezzling from his employer (a major bank) for months already, and would continue to do so for another year or so before he was discovered and prosecuted.

Reading a story like Bentley’s gives me comfort, because her husband was such an accomplished liar that she was caught in the thunderstorm of his deceptions for years.  M was more of a run-of-the-mill sociopath and unlike Bentley’s husband, M was the laziest person I have ever known.  M spun self-pitying stories, but they were unimaginative and routine, and his only ambition was to sit on the couch and watch television while smoking cigarettes.  He also never took care of anything, so his fine Chippendale furniture and expensive prints and other valuable objects were scratched, dirty and neglected.

At some point, anyone who is involved with a sociopath realizes that you are sharing your life with a person capable of tremendous evil.  This realization is chilling and you are never the same person afterwards. In my case, I had a number of clues leading up to this moment, the most shocking was learning that he had forged my name on the deposit slips for the embezzled money, a discovery I made when I found the police report about his crimes, which he'd also hidden.

Bentley's clues were far more dramatic, and when her husband attempted to murder her, it is a riveting and shocking read.  Her brilliant, sudden insight into how to survive the attack is one of the most audacious accounts I’ve ever read, and I feel enormous admiration for her intuitive grasp of what she needed to do to ensure her survival.

Bentley’s book is brutally honest about her own gullibility and her need to believe that her husband’s tales of daring and courage were true.  I found it painful to read when I saw my own ignorance mirrored in her actions, but also liberating and I give her great credit for being so forthright.  I was similarly foolish and ignored blaring warning signs - like the mail we would get addressed to other people.  We lived in a brand-new building, our address had never existed before and I was confused as to why we consistently kept getting mail for another man - even after we'd moved into another apartment in the same complex after the Loma Prieta earthquake forced us to move.  It did not cross my mind that he was using aliases.

After I had broken up with him (a drawn-out process, lengthened by my own gullibility) and moved on with my life, I was in a grocery store and got in line when I realized, with a shock, that he was just in front of me, along with an older gentleman.  He looked at me, gave a sickly smile, then pivoted and left the store, leaving the older gentleman to scramble behind, confused.  All of those times he would leave a bar, restaurant or store leaving me running to catch up with him suddenly all made sense - he had spotted someone he needed to avoid and saw no other option other than to simply walk out.

There are many more stories I could tell about M, but let me just conclude with a warning: If you meet someone who has no real friends, is vague about his or her past, is evasive about letting you come into contact with his or her family, the odds are high that you are dealing with a sociopath.

I highly recommend, A Dance With the Devil: A True Story of Marriage to a Psychopath.  If you’ve ever been involved with a sociopath, you will not be able to put it down.